"Are Indians by nature unhygienic?"

Sign in India advocating against open defecation
Author photo

A few weeks ago, B.S. Raghavan wrote an article that appeared in The Hindu, one of India’s largest newspapers. The title was immediately controversial: “Are Indians by nature unhygienic?” In the article, he writes of the litter and of the “general lack of cleanliness and hygiene” in both public and private spaces. He writes that, “Indians think nothing of spitting whenever they like and wherever they choose, and living in surroundings which they themselves make unliveable by their dirty habits” and that “If one wants to keep one’s sanity, one should avoid entering the kitchen of a hotel or even an ordinary household. I sometimes wonder how we are still alive eating at our hotels.” He finishes with the extra-controversial, “Are Indians then, by nature oblivious to standards of hygiene? And among Indians, are Hindus more indifferent in these respects than others?”

He’s not alone. Earlier this year Soutik Biswas, BBC Delhi correspondent, wrote an article entitled “Is India’s lack of toilets a cultural problem?”  In this article, he writes, “Is the lack of toilets and preference for open defecation a cultural issue in a society where the habit actually perpetuates social oppression, as proved by the reduced but continued existence of low caste human scavengers and sweepers?” It seems it is, he says. He cites that even in his upper-class Delhi suburb, he’ll watch his neighbors take their dogs out on the lawn to shit—as long as the shit is not in their house, it is ok if it is in a public space.

            India does have a severe sanitation issue. Over half of India’s 1.2 billion people have no toilet at home—if you look at the rural areas, that ratio goes up to 2/3. No one will contest this. Neither will anyone contest that India has hygiene, sanitation, and litter disposal management issues. However, these articles definitely make some statements that should be contested.

 

Trash piling up on the sides of Husein Sagar in Hyderabad

            Raghavan wrote that Indians are, by nature, unhygienic. By nature? As soon as you invoke “nature,” you threaten to biologize the issue, that somehow written in Indian DNA is a tendency to be “unhygienic.” This slippery slope is especially troubling when you consider that the writer is an Indian living in a pretty nice suburb of Delhi. The fact that he is writing in English states that he is pretty well educated. All in all, Mr. Raghavan is in a position where he undoubtedly has the financial resources to have a toilet at home, running water, and trash bins. When viewed through this perspective, his argument about “Indians” being “naturally unhygienic” becomes a sort of biologizing of  perceived negative aspects of being lower class.  

            Furthermore, what exactly is cleanliness? As a friend and colleague points out, “When one says that India is dirty etc, what is the standard one is judging it by? If it is ‘western practices’, then there is no way India could measure up, because these are themselves changing all the time.” In particular, I found it interesting the way in which different practices and senses were collapsed into one damning category: public urination, public spitting, haphazard disposal of litter, not sanitizing lunchboxes, open defecation and dish rags in kitchens. Why are all of these practices conflated? It is not disease that is the common thread in all of them—urine is relatively benign as a fluid. Then it is the aesthetic concern that seems to bind all of these practices together, and that aesthetic concern may indeed be Western.

            Biswas, on the other hand, blames Indian culture for the perpetuation of human scavengers (who clean up shit manually). While there are certainly aspects one could label “cultural” (however you want to define that term) that have caused the perpetuation of that practice (the caste system, strong fecal taboos, ideas of purity and pollution, etc.), the scavenger class was not really codified until colonial rule needed someone to clean up the city once the Yamuna had dried up, rendering the sewage system that had been built in Mughal times inoperable. Socioeconomic factors are one of the primary means by which caste is perpetuated.

            Both of these writers target Indianness or Indian culture as somehow being the reason that there are such sanitation problems. They both pay a sort of lip service to social and economic factors, but their acknowledgement of this is limited solely to the acknowledgement that the government has not done a stellar job of building toilets. Calling a lack of sanitation or hygiene a cultural problem or saying that Indians are somehow “naturally” unsanitary is problematic and troubling. By calling something “natural” or “cultural” it conceals social, political and economic factors that contribute to unequal standards across the world.